Modeling of a physical object often requires the taking of measurements. The measurement taking process on occasion introduces an error associated with each measured value. If the measurement taking process is conducted in an appropriate fashion, the errors should be normally distributed about a mean of zero. However, at times, the measurement taking or measurement recordation process is flawed, resulting in flawed or anomalous data. In such a case the use of such data to represent the measured object would be incorrect and would provide imprecise results. Therefore, it is desirable to determine whether a measurement is anomalous before using the measurement to represent a physical quantity.
Although anomaly detection has utility in numerous applications and for numerous types of measurements, one example of the usefulness of anomaly detection will be described with reference to bathymetric data. Oceanographers and ocean explorers make use of charts of the ocean floors. Such charts are produced by taking depth measurements of the ocean floor. One example of a procedure for taking a depth measurement of the ocean floor involves projecting, from an ocean vessel, sound waves to the bottom of the ocean floor and measuring the time required for a reflected wave to return to the vessel. Such a procedure is subject to a variety of sources of error that create anomalous measurements. For example, a large ocean animal, such as a whale, may reflect a portion of the sound wave back to the vessel, creating an anomalous reading. In addition, measurements may be improperly recorded in meters where feet is the appropriate unit of measure, or feet where meters are the appropriate unit of measure. Such sources of errors lead to anomalous measurements that should be discarded prior to utilizing the data to represent a physical quantity.